Swift

Erica Sadun is hosting a guest post by Tim Vermeulen. Testing in Swift, especially server-side, still has some rough edges. Documentation is certainly one of them. This article shows a feature that got in XCTest a bit under the radar. Enjoy!

A good reminder on your options for initializing constants in Swift. As the author says, some Swift language features take a while to sink in and become natural. Let's make sure to make this one stick in our minds.

Matt Gallagher discusses the monad-ish-ness of flatMap in Swift, although admittedly it's a weird thing to do. Swift doesn’t use the word “monad” anywhere in its documentation so monads are far from fundamental to Swift. But being a language that serves functional patterns very well, it makes sense to discuss topics like this.

Every time I hear my backend colleagues talk, often Elasticsearch comes up as a topic of discussion. How they're migrating data to use Elasticsearch, for example. But what exactly is Elasticsearch? And how does that work? Find out in this article!

Video / Podcasts / Books

Last week IBM hosted their first "Open Playbacks" live meeting on Hangouts. Despite some technical difficulties, they managed to explain what they've been working on lately and introduce to some of what's coming next in Kitura. Most importantly they emphasized that the next iteration of Kitura will be more community-driven. In that regard, I'm very pleased about the introduction of the Evolution repository, mimicking the Swift Evolution repo. That, I think, is a great step forward. Let's see how that turns out to be!